Loving A Storyteller.

Every time I think of her, I remember her by a different name. There are a few things I know about her that are concrete in my memory. She is a tattooist, she has light grey eyes, her septum is pierced, she likes tarot cards, she likes to colour her hair, we went to neighborhood schools but didn't know each other at the time. That's it. Her number on my phone is saved under the name Muskaan, her Instagram is under the name Ankita, her Tinder profile said her name was Neha and right now, I am pretty sure that when I was sucking her toes, I was calling her Nidhi. At one point or another I have also been sure that I called her Shreya, Kamini and Nalini.

One of those has got to be her name.

I met her three-years ago when I went back home for the express purpose of wandering in the mountains for hours on end. I've always been a bit of a wanderer. I am not really looking for anything nor would I call myself an explorer or someone who is necessarily fond of travelling. I've just, travelled a lot. When we were kids, I travelled because of my father's job. When I got older, I travelled because of mine (and while I do it considerably less now, by normative standards, it is still pretty high). I think nothing of it. It creates the illusion that I am impulsive but I am not, packing my bag and leaving on short notice is a normal part of my life. I take my routines with me. It is not just because of work, I also indulge myself for notions and ideas. Once a friend of mine, who is a photographer, and I had just finished a project together and over drinks we started to wonder what it would be like to follow a group of nomadic cow-herders whom we had briefly met earlier around for their summer trip up the mountains, so the next day we just did it. No one hired us to do this, we did not know why we were doing it, but she took her camera and I took my notebooks and we just did it. Part of being a storyteller is believing in legends of hidden treasures; a part of it is the willingness to go looking for them like a child even though you don't know what you will find.

Success or employment in the organised field of writing or photography notwithstanding, if you are a storyteller, you just are a storyteller. Whether you do that sitting around with your friends in the street during a lull or typing them into a computer at your desk to sell. It's not a job, it's not a vocation, it's as intrinsic as identity. When you smell a story, you are going to follow it even if you don't intend to do anything lucrative with it because it is the most exciting thing you can imagine finding out in the world. To that inherent impetus, technical skill is irrelevant. Technical skill is about whether you are hireable, being a storyteller is about who you are. It is difficult to explain these habits within the context of a job. To me, and to many storytellers, travelling to another country or going to run errands is the same thing in a way; I am excited, I don't know what I am going to find, I don't know how long I will be gone, who I am going to meet, what they're going to say and whether my perspective of the world will or will not be permanently altered but I am constantly open to being swayed in any direction. On an intellectual level all of this sounds peachy, but on a professional, familial and societal level, it is challenging because it is hard to process or manage having a partner, an employee, a friend, a neighbour like that. We like people to fit neatly into roles and some of that is perfectly reasonable. Reliability is a fair expectation. If you are paying me to do a particular task, I am useless to you if I am wandering the mountains for an undisclosed period of time doing a non-descript thing. Some of it is less about that and more about who you are expected to be as a person within certain roles.

On most fronts I have been extremely fortunate and privileged to have found partners, employers, family and friends who cater to my oddities and support who I am, and I truly hope that I do give them the same thing. I do certainly try. However as more labels are attached to a person, the social expectations of who you must be mount as well. This trip I took to wander in the mountains back home occurred six months after I got married. My partner was out on a work deployment for three months and my stepson was with his mom but even then, when I shared my intention to just go wander, the question I was invariably asked was: If you are going to be gone anyway, why don't you just be with your husband? You can help him. Aside from that there were a lot of other sub-textual questions, that were sometimes just explicitly asked — Why are you abandoning your home? How can you keep travelling like this after marriage? Aren't you going to change your job to one better suited to a family? Why haven't you changed after marriage? You know people think it is weird for a wife to travel by herself, why are you doing this? If you are going to your hometown, why won't you just stay with your family instead of hopping from one place to another? How is your husband okay with this? Are you having marital problems?

While marriage comes with its own societal expectations everywhere, in India it is extremely drastic. When you go from not-married to married, you must change drastically, and overnight. Part of this is your standard patriarchy, you are allegedly subject to a different mechanism of control (ie: husband and his family) and you must conduct yourself within the permitted guidelines of that structure. They will tell you that you are so fortunate if you have a "permissive" new family, completely failing to consider that some of us marry a person, not a family, and none of us are truly free when freedoms are wrest from monoliths of control or offered like alms for which we must prostate in gratitude. I was born with my freedom, I will not beg for it. I will not cower to emotional extortion, I will not change who I am so someone else can feel better, if that means I must emancipate myself from family, I have done it before and I will do it again. If you try to take my freedom away, I will neither adjust nor compromise, I will get on a fucking soapbox and put the system on trial. While I professionally exist in a world of independent, modern and free women, the world around all of us still takes a great deal of issue with our non-married married behaviour.

I used to be reticent to marry, and even after I did it, to accept myself within the ranks of marriage but I have come to realise that if I must be part of the institution, I will do so loudly, if for no reason other than the fact that my presence within this covenant is disruptive to its regular functioning. People around me do not know how to process a woman who doesn't run everything by her husband, who doesn't define herself within the context of her family, who has her own life, who is away from home and child for regular intervals of time, who continues to fall in love with other people, who won't put on the garb that makes her "look married" but most of all they do not know how to process a marriage in which none do that is an issue to any of the parties involved. All of the resistance I have faced to my "married" behaviour is about that. It's not about who I am, it's about, how is it not causing problems in your relationship? Because, it has to, if it doesn't their cautionary tales stop working. If I refuse to replace the core of my identity with the words "wife and mother" and I still have great relationships with my husband and child, then society has failed. When I lose myself to a chase for weeks and my husband is only really amused by what I am discovering, then society has failed. When I tell the story of a girl I met whose name keeps changing in my memory and my family already knows that story and merely laughs at me being me, then society has failed.

And there is a desire to over-simplify this and say that relationships function better when there are no expectations but that is just not true. There are expectations but love always exists outside roles and expectations. My partner does expect things from me. He expects that I handle our finances and investments because he is real shit at it. I expect that he will make me my coffee every damn morning I am shit until I take the first sip. We expect support from each other when it comes to parenting based on our schedules and there are times when one or the other must do more parenting, and we both expect that the other will be amenable to that. Expectations are not a bad thing, but when expectations are bartered for love, then it stops working for me. I want to spend every day of my life in barefaced awe of the human being that he is. Not of the husband he is, the father he is, the lover he is, the sadist he is, the master he is. I like and dislike those things based on what is happening, and you better believe that when he packs a powerbar for the kid for his fruit-break at school I am judging the hell out of his parenting, but I love him outside of all of those roles. There are no expectations on who he is. Just like there are none on who I am.

Everyone in the world may take issue with me getting up right now, packing a bag and chasing a notion around the country, but he watches me with amusement, interest and support. I am many things to him.

I am his partner.

His wife.

A co-parent.

His slave.

His lover.

The reason he has any savings at all.

And we enjoy all of those things together, but he loves me because of who I am. Who I am is none of those things and when I do things that are inherently me, he loves me more. This is a form of freedom from roles that seems almost utopian and every single day I am grateful that I got to experience it for any measure of time at all. To be admired within roles may be gratifying, but to be loved outside of them, for who you are, is the most freeinf thing I have ever experienced. Love that is devoid of sacrifice of your identity is the only form of it that is worth it. I will do a lot for you but I will always be myself.

I will always get up and leave.

I will always chase stories like a carefree child going after a brightly coloured butterfly.

I thought that was hard to love, disqualifying even, but the way he looks at me when I lose myself to the world shows me it isn't hard at all. I thought it was impossible to love a storyteller, his beaming face, shows me it is delightful.